Poetry By Subhaga Crystal Bacon

        Ron Gilbert CC




To the Doug Fir at Twisp Park


Today, I noticed you for the first time, 
your twin trunks there by the pavilion
shooting up so high, I never look,
follow your puzzle bark, pieces the size 
of a child’s hand, climbing to your canopy
yards and yards away. In your bark, a rusted 
carabiner with braided frayed rope. 

You must’ve seen so much. Cami’s death, 
the shot and the blood; her resolve or lack of hope. 

And that rope. I seem to think a lot about death 
these days. A whole-body settling into whatever 
void awaits, or light, its contrast to that heaviness, 
the dark hole at the center of things. 
 
I walk on, careful on the icy path.
One foot in front of the other, river passing.
You’re behind me now, whatever you know.

​



I came back because there was nowhere else to go.
                             after Anne Sexton


Pouring rain, all the work of men done for a day.
The cabin pings with tin-roof rain,
and a small fire in the stove kills the damp.
I’m inside the nearly naked trunks of trees
their sodden, long dead leaves surrender
like ghosts to waiting earth. I admit,
I sized up right angled boughs perpendicular--
is there not an easier word? – to the ground.
Slim, muscular as the arms of young men,
just a knowing, here’s where you could string
yourself up. Stump nearby. I really 
have no wish to die. It’s like cruising, in a way.
The tree and I wink, side eye each other 
as if to say: I see your appeal, my brother.

​

​
Subhaga Crystal Bacon is a Queer poet living in rural northcentral Washington on unceded Methow land. She is the author of four collections of poetry including Transitory, recipient of the Isabella Gardner Award for Poetry, forthcoming in the fall of 2023 from BOA Editions, and Surrender of Water in Hidden Places, winner of the Red Flag Poetry Chapbook Prize forthcoming in the spring of 2023.